Don’t be misled by recent news concerning America’s monitoring of Angela Merkel’s wireless phone. Germany’s chancellor is crying foul over the latest revelation concerning the NSA’s penchant for spying on, well, everybody, from world leaders to American citizens and every phone call or text message in between. Yes, the disclosure is an embarrassment to the United States. Yes, this is simply the latest in a long series of diplomatic embarrassments, as the Obama administration proves there is no international ally it cannot alienate. But no, this is not really a big deal. Merkel’s objections are political theater, her outrage feigned for media outlets. There isn’t a politician alive who doesn’t know that our friends spy on us as readily as do our enemies.

The New York Post‘s Max Boot put it as bluntly as only the Post can. “Grow up,” writes Boot. “Does the National Security Agency spy on your leaders? Probably. Do you spy on leaders of allied states including the United States? Probably. You just don’t have the resources or capability to spy as effectively as the NSA does. But if you did, you would. … In the pursuit of their interests, all states need as much information as possible about the actions and (even harder to fathom) the intentions of other states, even (or perhaps especially) those with whom they are allied at the moment. There is pretty much no state on whose automatic loyalty you can count.”

Thanks to whistleblowing traitor Edward Snowden (whose noble motives were perhaps easier to accept as advertised before he sought asylum among nations that hate us), we know that the NSA spied on a staggering 125 billion phone calls in just one month. But this, again, is not what you should be taking away from the contrived furor over Merkel’s phone. The lesson we should instead take away from this news story is that Germany’s chancellor has a cell phone for us to monitor and that we routinely did so. This is the leader of a technologically advanced, industrialized Western nation, whose communications conceivably include a great deal of sensitive diplomatic content. If she is vulnerable to routine spying on her phone, so are other world leaders.

Or did you forget President Obama’s beloved BlackBerry?

“Obama’s BlackBerry dependency was touted as a sign of modernity before his 2009 inauguration,” writes Andrea Peterson, “to the point where it was a news story that he was allowed to keep the device post-inauguration.” But this somewhat understates the case. Obama keeping his BlackBerry was a specific security exception, a change in the way presidential communications had always been handled. Making a president give up his wireless phone prior to his term in office makes good sense for two reasons, the first of which is administrative. There is no insignificant correspondence from an American president; there are record-keeping requirements for his communications in office. The second reason is the more important of the two, as Angela Merkel’s complaints underscore, and that is security. The president is simply too important an individual to have and use a wireless phone – security-hardened or not – that can be monitored by foreign powers and enemy states.

Then, too, there’s the fact that our technology dictator is actually typical of “progressive” libs in that he doesn’t understand the technology he touts.

“[T]technology that seemed cutting-edge in 2008 now seems painfully anachronistic,” writes Peterson. “Obama was reportedly ‘befuddled’ during an attempt to call a volunteer from an iPhone during the 2012 campaign.” This is the same sibilant, stuttering fool whose supposedly brilliant oratory skills collapsed the moment he stepped out of range of a teleprompter. This is the same classless, arrogant jerk who gave world leaders DVDs that were formatted for the wrong region and an iPod loaded with his own speeches. This is the same haughty, clueless dolt who promised to have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. This is the same petulant, defensive idiot who believed erecting a monstrously overpriced website to sell government-ordered insurance would somehow magically result in “affordable health care.”

What all these elements have in common is the “progressive” liberal tendency to view technology as panacea. Over and over again, liberals throw technology at a problem without bothering to understand either the problem or the proposed solution. Like mental patients, liberals never learn from their mistakes. Like sociopaths, liberals don’t care if their government mandates don’t work so long as the blame for their failures cannot be affixed to them.

The result is the seemingly inexplicable behavior one sees from Obama and his ilk where technology is concerned. Obama’s NSA spies on Angela Merkel’s phone – yet Obama insists on carrying around and using his own BlackBerry, because what could go wrong? The technology for viable electric cars that are both affordable and comparable to combustion-engine vehicles simply is not sufficiently developed – yet Obama believes he can order car companies to create what he believes they should sell (and what he believes you should want to buy). Obama puts a gun to your head and orders you to buy health care you cannot afford from a website that does not work – yet he and his minions blame insurance companies for dropping hundreds of thousands of individuals in direct compliance with Obamacare’s minimum-standard mandates. Obama claims overwhelming demand has swamped the Obamacare website’s servers yet forgets that he manufactured that demand by forcing Americans to sign up for it.

Only a liberal could order millions of people to buy something at gunpoint and then marvel at how popular that purchase proves to be. This is a fundamental disconnect from reality. This is a lack of understanding of cause and effect. This is the belief that simply because a totalitarian Democrat orders something, reality should hurry to obey. This is the liberal delusion that Obama’s demands can somehow rearrange the metaphysical world, that technology itself should comply with his whims despite his ignorance.